On Mar 5, 2014, at 4:37 AM, Jürgen Simon <si...@webtecc.com> wrote:
> Hello, > > this is not a technical inquiry, more a temperature check on the business > side of WebObjects. It is my impression that at least in Germany, after the > 2008/2009 crisis the market for WebObjects-projects has really been down a > lot. I have been looking hi and lo for opportunities to work with WO again, > but apart from self-initiated projects there was nothing going on. > > Is this perception limited to Germany or is it even just me? Are there any > project marketplaces for WO that I am not aware of? How much of a future > would you guys think WO really has? > > Kind Regards, > Jürgen Having worked with WO for a while now, I think it’s safe for me to say WO has a limited future. For one, Apple did not open source it when they left it for dead in 2008/2009. The “Apple only hardware” license restriction is pretty lame too. I seems they did this hoping to kill it. It appears they are looking at other solutions besides WO for their own usage. The last time I saw an @apple.com address break radio silence, it was on the Cayenne list. It seems pretty tragic, but that’s what it looks like from the outside. Two, Anjo left Wonder. Mike was poached by Apple and has been MIA since. Without Anjo to keep people in line, I’ve noticed the quality of contributions have declined. Without Mike’s tireless contributions, I’ve noticed most commits are not in the form of great useful new frameworks, but refactoring of old frameworks. Refactoring combined with loose quality control has made Wonder something that went from “I can’t wait to update my repo” to “I’m scared if I update my repo, stuff is going to break… again.” Third, the type of applications WO excels at are no longer in demand. If you make an app that requires someone to poke in 42 text fields on their smartphone, you are doing it wrong. But that’s exactly the sort of app that WO is purpose built to handle. Dynamic URLs are universally hated by the marketing department. "Why can’t we just have domain.com/page?? WO URLs are horrible for SEO!!” WO can give you a table of data sorted and nested inside another table of data which is also sorted and nested as deep as you want to go. Automatically. And it will keep track of all that, but then... who’s going to read a table that big on a 5” screen? The design department wants minimal info on the page, please. Just the facts ma’am. Those sort of desktop apps have already been built. They’re now in maintenance mode. No one is going to rewrite them in WO any sooner that someone is going to rewrite all the WO apps in something else. Fourth, the tooling is showing bit rot. Q is the only person left who really has a handle on how WOLips works. My copy of rule modeler is buggy as hell and crashes 50% of the time I try to launch or save something under Mavericks. Installing WO for dev or deployment requires a PhD in WebObjects. Monitor slowly becomes less and less responsive until you’re forced to reboot it. Even when it works, it doesn’t really monitor everything I need to know. Memory, cpu, disk space? Oh, go get Nagios and add to your administration nightmare. Finally, there’s the learning cliff involved with WO. WO developers are as rare as unicorns. Learning WO in depth takes months/years to do, even for an experienced Java developer. In a lot of cases, the WO app that is out there isn’t in prime condition and requires lots of maintenance. It was probably built on an existing legacy database with a schema that goes against the WO way. That results a sub-optimal development experience with WO. Especially for the uninitiated. Nobody is going to learn it on the job and think “Wow, this is so great! I love WebObjects!!" This is not to say WO is bad. WO is great for what it does. If you have a mac, you know WO already, you don’t mind the tools are a little creaky, you have your own wonder fork, you are okay with writing whatever frameworks you need, you are the dba, and it works for you.. knock yourself out. I don’t expect to see a lot of new faces around though. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list (Webobjects-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
